


Heaven Is Empty (and all the angels are monsters)

by theneonpineapple



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angels are Dicks, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Fucked Up, Gen, POV Original Character, POV Outsider, Revenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-13
Updated: 2018-08-13
Packaged: 2019-06-26 19:24:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15669708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theneonpineapple/pseuds/theneonpineapple
Summary: Cornelia "Neele" Webber's little brother went missing on his way home from work.Two years later, his body shows up, showing the signs of a gruesome murder, and a face that has neither aged nor decomposed in all this time.





	Heaven Is Empty (and all the angels are monsters)

**Author's Note:**

> warnings for: dubious consent of the angelic possession variety, descriptions of a violent murder (depicted onscreen in canon)
> 
> additional warnings for: authorial cynicism
> 
> [canon characters left untagged in order to avoid upsetting fans of the character, since this fic takes a dim view of him and indeed all angels]

_"[S]tretching off to infinity were the hosts of Heaven and Hell, wingtip to wingtip. If you looked really closely, and had been specially trained, you could tell the difference."_

_Good Omens_ , Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

* * *

 

She was the one who gave him the nickname.

Their parents had named them Alphonse and Cornelia, which were both _terrible_ names, and she had been seven years old when he was born, so she already knew a thing or two about terrible names and their impact.

It doesn't make it onto the tombstone.

 _Alphonse Webber_ , it said. _September 5, 1995_.

There had been nothing underneath it, at first. No body. Not even an empty coffin. Just. Dirt, and a beautiful marble slab with an angel carved into it. No end date.

Neele's advisor had been understanding. What else could he have been, when she showed up in his office, packed bag slung over her shoulder, hair a mess, eyes red, and said _my little brother is missing_?

She'd stumbled back in almost two months later, a stack of missing fliers still in her bag, mud on her boots from searching the woods herself weeks after the last few volunteers had given up.

_HAVE YOU SEEN ME? LAST SEEN 10/15/12_

"We had to give your TA position to someone else," he'd said. "But given the circumstances, we can still waive your tuition for the semester, even if we can't pay you the full stipend."

She went home for Christmas. Her mother's hastily fixed makeup and her father stumbling over the prayer, _when God sent down his only son_ , that was what marked Christmas dinner, not nudging her brother's ankle under the table and winking when she slipped her overcooked pot roast to the dog.

And when she'd ducked out after dinner, hoping to drink copiously at some party she'd gotten a pity-invite to from some old high school classmate who never left Lansing, she wound up puking in a near-stranger's bathroom because _All I Want For Christmas_ had come on.

 _All I want for Christmas is my little brother back_.

Worse, she ran into some other too-sympathetic former classmate who'd actually said, _got any New Year's resolutions?_ while searching desperately for something to say to fill the silence after _I heard about your brother_ had left her nearly catatonic in a supermarket.

"No," she said, hand tightening on the handles of the shopping basket. "Not much in the way of resolution, these days."

She'd barely made it a month into the spring semester before she stopped bothering to pretend she was making headway on her research.

So ended Neele's once-bright academic career: with collection notices for student loans piled up in a crappy apartment, while she digs through every shitty conspiracy theory forum that so much as mentions bright flashes of light, or Weiner Hut, or Lansing.

There's something about a loan shark in Illinois that seems to be linked to trafficking of some sort, and she flags it without much hope, and the phone rings.

On July 11, 2014, a body finally joins the grave.

When Neele finally escapes her parents' tearful, intensely religious speeches about catharsis to the gathered relatives and general local gawkers, she boots her laptop back up and goes back to the crazier conspiracy theories.

This is what she knows: a security camera went on the fritz at the morgue at 11:15pm on June 16. It came back on at 11:23pm. In that time, someone had somehow put her brother's body on a slab, his eyes closed, his arms folded across his chest, still in his blood-stained uniform. And, when the coroner had cleaned the blood from his face for him to finally be released to the mortician, he looked exactly as he had almost two years previously, at barely-seventeen.

This is what she knows: there were holes drilled in her baby brother's skull. Cuts across his face. A stab wound that went straight through his entire chest cavity and severed his spinal cord.

This is what she knows: her brother was murdered.

And they called her obsessive _before_.

She dug deeper into that crazier conspiracy board.

They carved his death date into his headstone as June 16, 2014, because his body had barely begun to enter decomposition.

On July 16, their mother called.

"Someone desecrated your brother's grave," she said. "The groundskeeper saw it. Someone gouged out the angel."

Neele glanced at the claw hammer she'd used to do it.

"That's crazy, Mom," she said, and hit the _next page_ button on a google search for 'how to kill angels'.

Somewhere in 2016, their parents stopped calling even on holidays.

Somewhere in 2017, Neele stopped carrying a cell phone at all.

 

* * *

 

 

"Why are you _doing_ this?" the angel demanded.

Neele sighed. "Answer the question, please."

"Yes, yes, the vessel is unharmed, it will live, but _please_ , we're an endangered species—"

She smiled. It wasn't a very happy or friendly smile. "I know," she said, and slammed her hand into the sigil.

The angel died screaming with a borrowed throat.

"Why would you do that?" Asked the poor bastard it had been possessing, when he woke up on the way to the hospital. "Why would you kill an angel?"

"Why'd you say yes?" Neele asked.

"B-because it was an angel, h-he said God _needed_ me—"

She glanced at him in the rearview mirror. "It lied."

He swallowed. "That wasn't an angel?"

"Oh, it was. But God's not around to need much of anyone. And if that fucker ever comes back, I'm gonna find a way to kill him too."

"You're insane."

"Nah," she said. Then, "Well. Maybe. But that's not why I'm doing this."

"Then _why_?"

"My little brother grew up in a religious household. And some eldritch abomination fed him a lie, like that thing fed you, that God needed him, and he said _yes_ , and he died for it. An entire televangelist group was developed just to brainwash more people into letting angels use their bodies, and they all died too, fighting in some civil war among them. You're awake, right? The entire time?"

"I—yes. I remember."

"My brother was tortured. He was barely 17. He was tortured beyond what any human could withstand and then murdered because thousands of _creatures_ thought their petty squabbles were more important than human lives. And I can't resurrect the bastard who took my brother's body, so I'm killing every other evil son of a bitch I can get my hands on. You understand?"

"But they're angels," he said.

Neele turned her gaze back to the road. "It's like talking to a brick wall," she sighed.

So she mostly didn't talk to the 'vessels' once they were alone in their heads again. Of course, she'd killed twenty-six angels, and only eleven vessels were still capable of speech at all.

And then the dwindling numbers of angels became absolute silence.

Nothing.

Not a peep.

Plenty of demons, but they were harder to kill without hurting the poor suckers they were riding, and better organized.

In fact –

"Haven't heard anything from the angels in a while," she said, conversationally.

The demon – whose victim was already long dead – stared at her. And then threw its head back and laughed. "Haven't you heard, hunter? They're all gone. The few that aren't dead are holed away in Heaven. All that's left is the Winchesters' pet angel."

It took a little convincing. But Neele got the name out of him.

One last angel.

 _Castiel_.

 

* * *

 

Sometime in early 2018, the granite slab – since replaced, and allowed to remain unmolested since it no longer had a winged bastard on it – disappeared. Another one replaced it.

It was simple, a small plaque made out of some unidentifiable silver-toned metal that only a select handful of people would be able to recognize as fifteen angel blades melted down and recast. It listed his death date not as when his battered but undecomposed body appeared in a morgue on a hot summer night in 2015, but as the day he disappeared in a bright light on the walk home from work on a cool autumn evening in 2012. A small photo was inset into the plaque, his face split with a toothy smile, cropped off before you could see his arm slung around his little-but-older sister.

She'd given him the nickname when he was small, and he'd never gone by anything else. Maybe one day he would've gotten tired of a kid's nickname, and shortened it further. Al, maybe. Maybe he would've complained when she ruffled his hair and called him his childhood nickname instead. Maybe he would've gone to law school. Maybe he would've dropped out.

But an angel had manipulated him, had capitalized on years of indoctrination, had used him despite his young age, and had left behind a broken and bloody shell of a boy who had once been full of life.

So now all he had was the nickname she'd given him when he was a bundle in a white blanket with blue stripes, handed to her in a hospital room.

"Hi, Alfie," Neele said. "I'm your sister. I'm gonna take care of you."

_ALFIE_

_SEPTEMBER 5 TH, 1995 – OCTOBER 12TH, 2012_

_BELOVED BROTHER_

**Author's Note:**

> I've said it before and I'll say it again: Samandriel isn't a child, he's just wearing one
> 
> I made [a post](https://wayward-idiots.tumblr.com/post/173294519713/listen-not-to-get-too-anti-angel-here-but) and then I had to write about it


End file.
